cultural intelligence works design equals information full text visual mark-up

Design Equals Information introduction, invisible design went extinct, new media: speed gained, interest raised?, information design metaphors, design as meta-information, paying attention, earning attention and... oh yeah, speed control, some recommended reading, Web Summary

abstract
The World Wide Web commercially emerged almost five years ago as a medium in which graphic communication and telecommunication converge. Enhanced by tools for the authoring and distribution of information it provides us with the possibilities of widespread publication and interaction. Marketable products and services make the web an easy to use and affordable platform to express and share individual interests—theoretically.

What You See Is What You Get, in the Plug-in and Play-on arena of the web. Who wants to know what this means only has to step up any old Internet Café, pay a few bucks surfing time and shop at both some large corporate sites and random homepages. All the information is there. All the design is there. All the communication is there as well. It's been cut and pasted and is ready to navigate. So does it deliver? All the wrong turns are there as well.

This paper is not going to answer the `deliverable' question. Stuff works generally, almost by definition. When alternatives are hard to find, anyway. But when indeed we can build a global graphic communication medium and allow anyone to race it off the shelf, some things are bound to be overlooked. Technology, content, design, communication—to name the corner stones of the current information infrastructure—have to be subtly balanced to make any mediation worthwhile. In this medium as in any other, and older.

Professionals, equally in the design or editorial, intermediary fields, need new strategies to add value, to push the envelope and set standards. Only if design sets out to equal information it can hope to be meaningful in a much contested area. It will have to consider speed, customization, reputation, attention—to promote information presence for a world of diversity.

introduction
With proliferating communication via networks like the Internet and the World Wide Web, the consumer of increasing amounts of information (that we all are), is exposed to myriad unsolicited design solutions in browser, email and multi-media software. Actually the fact that the authoring and design tools used for the design and production of information are consumerware, brings forth a new era in graphical communication. Commercialization (some would say democratization) of graphic media began with Letterpress and the photocopier nearly half a century ago, and was continued with the Desktop Publishing possibilities of the personal computer in the 1980s, but only when connected to the Internet and with the advent of the World Wide Web (invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee) we are experiencing the full availability of communication tools for the production and distribution of information at a household price fixing. The same tools are utilised by laymen and professionals, which already is a unique fact in the history of graphic communication. Furthermore, although limited by the use of off the shelf commercial products, the hypermedium itself invites consumers to become providers or producers of information in several ways.

First of all the wired community's emerging industries are propagating the networked society as egalitarian both in its means and ends. The Internet feeds global fantasies of equal access, presence and knowledge acquisition and distribution. Second, in order to attain InfoArcadia, these industries depend on consumer feedback from day one. Those who are building the infrastructures and developing the necessary software to navigate these, need to invest in content and to build-in customization in order to grow their markets. Goods and services, and indeed information: all content needs a seamless carrier flow in the one-to-one catering future. When graphic communication meets telecommunication, at a scale like it does today, old communicational and design expertise will have to mark up, or disappear.

Thus, Early Information Age is New Design Age as well. Not only are tools and media widely penetrating consumer markets, they are (it doesn't hurt to repeat this) truly `new' media. However helpful traditional skills and theory in graphic design, writing and film may be for the design and editorial professional, the information age's unique technological conditions of converging telecommunication and graphic communication, as emerging in the World Wide Web since 1994, brings entirely new challenges. In order for design to `equal information', as is the provocation of this paper, in order for it to add value and promote critical standards, in order for it to provide content from a tradition of communicational responsibility, it has to adapt its strategies and revise its role and, in some special sense, become `streetwise'.

Presence of information seems like the least of all problems to worry about. Isn't the WWW all about presence, global presence and availability? Which is precisely the medium's problem. We can't be all present at the same `place' at the same time (I'll get back to the metaphors soon). Attention needs to be focused, and focus is the best space killer available. So with all the presence going on on the web, the number one scarcity in its economy is attention. Better pay some to the continuation of this story.

invisible design went extinct 73 words
The famous `design is invisible' (Design ist Unsichtbar) adagio didn't hold long. Not even so much postmodern radical relativism or complicity theory advanced an unsentimental understanding of design as being ideological—no matter which form it takes. Designers themselves, from the very positive and constructive idea of their responsibility in contemporary communication, conclude that their prime possibility to literally add value to information should be `visible', visual—to bear the mark of presence.

Communication takes form through (professional) mediation of design. Hence 90% of all non-verbal (psychologist will argue, also of our verbal) communication is a designed (authored, constructed, made, conceptualized and consequently formed) expression—its prime content and both its medium and design context are equally important and contribute to the mediation. A product or service conceived is put forward, marketed; its qualities are explained, enlarged, embedded in the flow of signifiers of contemporary culture by multiple authors, among them the designer.

Increasingly with new information media the recipient can be considered yet another co-producer of information. His or her profile of interests serves as a starting point for all who are involved in the process. The critical consumer is closest to what can be considered the raw data out of which information is produced: interest and attention. Information without a recipient is waste. The raw material of all information is interest and feedback. Information starves when interest fades. Information design could be re-labelled attention management. As a matter of fact a lot of information is `designed to fit your interests': increasing emphasis is placed on contextual values like connectivity, customizability, community and all the different lifestyle topics. It is part of the trend to shift from product to service. As an analogy to the importance of informational context could serve the information sharing community around specific diseases: the patients' association. (Analogies to the medical sphere are in general particularly insightful, because they introduce a `matter of life and death' urgency to the debate that other environments desperately lack today). The patient is an especially rewarding prototype. He or she is equally depending on his or her direct environment and the medical discipline. Information from the latter keeps the patient alive physically, information from the former keeps him alive psychologically and socially. Sharing information, sharing the disease, diagnoses and medication with other patients and their families will inform communication with the medical world in no small way. Same goes for the families involved, who share the object of their sorrow and pain and their own grieve with others in the same situation. `Information sharing' and `context building' are too clinical terms to deal with those matters, but the urgency that should be projected in other fields of contemporary communication is well illustrated.

To come back to the invisibility of design and its acclaimed specialisms: aiming at it would be the same as to demand the invisibility of diagnosis and medication from an equally specialized medical community, in the process of healing a patient. The patients, and the patients' association, are active players and producers in the information exchange that hopefully will lead to the defeat of the disease. The importance of this point to the information design discipline was very well emphasized by Communication Research Institute of Australia's Maureen Mackenzie-Taylor, who carefully explained at VisionPlus 3, how they set about to communicate client Merck's product Crixivan (indinavir sulfate) to its users: the hiv positive community. As an example of very sensitive subject matter, in need of a personal and informal approach, yet communicating literally vital information, having to be updated frequently, serving the user as a vehicle for every communication of his illness, this project considered all critical technical and contextual demands of the information communicated.

Invisible design dates from times and media of transparency that no longer exist, neither deserve to come back. Information design sports a lot of specialized and scientific skills and tools, that are open to objectification but nevertheless for that reason alone shouldn't ever become autonomous beyond debate, in an age of information vitality.

new media: speed gained, interest raised? 99 words
Being close to the opposite of a technophile (always insisting that it's not the warez, but the strings they tune), my recent lightning fast ADSL (Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line) connection to the Internet unexpectedly informed this paper not just a little bit. At a time when WWW is still referred to as the `world wide wait', to experience its navigation at a speed that surpasses any other application on my computer (word processor, desktop publisher, photo editor—any of the current tools of the information processing skill) makes a difference in appreciation—and reflection—beyond the imaginable.

Since early February 1998 I am connected via ADSL for a four months free trial period, set up by Dutch KPN Telecom. Screaming throughput speed is at a max of 2Mb/s down and a `meagre' 200k/s up the plain old copper wires, that I simultaneously use for voice, fax or data traffic (using my own 28.8k snail modem). Since ADSL is no dial up connection and I pay no fee, I am connected to the net 24hrs per day. To see software download at a breathtaking 400k per second is a shock. Hacking the browser war having Netscape, Internet Explorer and alternative Opera open at the same time, with RealAudio live broadcasting Texas Style Lone Star Radio KKZN blaring Janis Joplin's Bobby McGee is no whistling Dixie either. But such statistics, impressive as they may be, were not a major influence on this paper. So what was?

Like I said I'm not in love with technology and I am patient with my tools, more even so with the digital ones than with the real slow nuts and bolts that keep my physical environment together. I consider `speed' and `acceleration' at the best a given of some of our new tools' performance, and of the information that we process with it. I have no stock to monitor, I don't chase my toddlers' image in real time when they are under the supervision of highly qualified others, I don't even zap my tv at the occasional times when I turn it on. I like to see myself as a slow consumer and digester. My interest in networked information media is focused at its vital logistics and content, which are equal at every speed—at least so I thought. I marvel at the simultaneously global and local intricacy of networked communication, the abundant equal availability of idiosyncratic content and common knowledge, its searchability and the links that weave and contextualize it. I am sceptical though at the industries that are pulled up around the `Republic of Information', as it is called for the occasion of VisionPlus 4. I see a growing stock of old media on the subject of new media on my bookshelves, and notice only a gradual shift in attention away from most things that my life was centered around before 1994. This attention shift I furthermore, rather masochisticaly, like to refer to as a `brain drain': a migration that my peers from the arts and design community and myself are engaged in.

It is the very `graduality' of the shift, this unknowingly becoming immersed in new media's conditions, that my new connection speed made me aware of. It came with another big bang, like my first hands on experience with a personal computer in the early 80s, or my first encounter with the Mosaic browser and the World Wide Web in 1994, when new worlds emerged—when I realized that information exchange would never be the same again. The interesting qualities that I recognize in networked media (the intricacy of content and context, shifting properties of time and space, the blessings of email connectivity) all gained perspective with my new connection. Not the speed, but the resulting problem of presence of the information mediated was what stared me right in the face. Presence of information in dynamic media is unlike that in any other medium. It needs all our attention to survive.

Isn't presence of information what we aim for in information design in the first place? And hasn't presence of information always involved some kind of authorization: a `place' for information to stand out from? A reliable source? Even with the early Internet/WWW we experienced information as `taking place'—performed by someone, somewhere, broadcast from some kind of foothold, as in the old days. Information used to be everything you always wanted to know about anything, that was handed over to you, to your delight. Not so at high speed anymore. Information's all dressed up and has no place to come from or go to. Its reputation is that of some wandering agent of change beyond ever reaching a settling goal. With all the Internet/WWW's (and networked digital media in general) lack of trustworthy authenticity, with all the unresolved questions on who's informing who in any contact over the networks, we are left totally informed but totally out of focus at the same time.

Information's presence (and its disappearance, and re-appearance... and disappearance, ad infinitum) will be the high stake of information design for dynamic information media. Speed will be a presence to sell, and speed will (if not controlled by design) sell out presence. Information Design will be a tachometer on the speed and quality of information exchange. `Design Equals Information' in this context means that design will be the prime `meta-information' that slows down not so much the retrieval, but certainly the cognition of information. I'll get back to the issue of speed control (which by no way necessarily means information slowing down) as a design principle in my conclusion. First I want to investigate some of the current profiles of information design, and its practitioners, and the aptness of their metaphors for dynamic publication.

information design metaphors 53 words
Any mention of information design seems like an understatement today. At the dawn of the information age, its design would be ubiquitous and all encompassing. Although Edward Tufte likes to link Galileo to its discussion, information design advertizes as an emergent practice. To distinguish it from general graphic design, or from instructional design, or from the new field of interaction design, its practitioners delve into analogies and metaphors that certainly don't fit the bill when applied to the design of information in `real time', dynamic media.

Most of information design's nouveaux riches call themselves `information architects'. Why architects? Because of a lack of appealing metaphors for informational `organization' and presence (since no, web `pages' do not accumulate in a `book', although its pop-up information `landscape' can be `browsed'—but alas, even when data `proliferate', also the landscape metaphor doesn't fit the bill; the net is neither an `organism', nor a `city', just as cities aren't proper organisms themselves. The net isn't even the information `superhighway' that spoils an InfoArcadia of pure meaning and communication, while hurrying towards a city of promiscuous user interaction, in the ecstasy of communication and information foraging... and what about this `user'? Is (s)he the information addict, on some kind of communication panacea, or just someone who never reads the manual but `naturally' plugs and plays new gear? So where does the architect come in? A skilled signboard painter could do the job as well...

Even when such analogies can serve one (and are temporary unavoidable) to study the phenomena of the information outburst that we're witnessing, they will only serve as a filter to it, and show in their findings as much of the qualities of the filter as of the actual subject of investigation. So the `information architect' could very well be our emerging expert in information design and supervisor to the building of it? Considering information hardly is a building material nor a product of mere construction, an information architect would be a special kind of information designer, limited to a single view on information and the consequent handling down of it. With a distinct mission, differing from e.g. the information agent, scenarist, or, quite literally right: the information screenwriter. The architect would then stay around the landscape to try to `solidify' information into a state that most of us would still consider our built environment to be in (although an increasing number of well-known stone piling architects are questioning the `solid state' of their own discipline's production, and virtualize their efforts). Information `architecture' remains one way to articulate content. But, considering the information `tsunami', at least a few other options, for those who consider it their goal in life and business to mediate—and consequently if only temporary control—this new good, should be considered.

Marshall McLuhan claimed our inaptitude to deal with new phenomena, when we reach for existing models, to cause the `rear-view mirror' effect: we stumble forward while looking back. Our first cars were built to look like coaches, our PCs have typewriter developed `qwerty' keyboards (designed to slow down our pounding, in order not to clog up the hammers), our software knowbots anthropomorphasize on screen as irritating midgets waving to attract our attention for some bargain or other information nugget... Finally, just because the origins of the current Internet lie in the military ARPA net, a lot of its metaphors are violently military: engaging in the age of information's abundant communication first of all means to survive it: escape the eyeball hunting party, stay abreast technological innovators and their aggressive plug-ins, choose sides in the browser war, line up in the World Wide Wait—'Your Internet Wants You' points at us on virtually every corner of cyberspace... Now don't hit `esc' too soon.

Hence, any labelling of the information designer as an architect/agent/scenarist/screenwriter, reflects rear-view mirrorism, however dynamic and apt to change their actual information mediation may be. With the emerging consumer driven unruliness of information traffic in interactive communication networks, with so many architects out there eager to build their special interest bannered information follies, updating weekly, daily, hourly, in real time, I would expect some professional guidance rather than more building or for that matter, smarter building, or mapping. In the following I will argue that in dynamic publication all guidance will come as flexible meta-information, both by technological standard as by cultural necessity. Attention follows visibility and presence, attention focused on information kills space and speed and architecture, but is positively absorbed by content.

design as meta-information 64 words
Many refer to the information era as an age of post- or dis-intermediation. Eager users of the new tools and channels claim direct access to vital information, following their best interests. Yet the opposite of dis-intermediation is desirable: the more information is exchanged, the more mediation is required.

Design doesn't master-build information, it articulates, brings forth and represents it, as in making it present. All old definitions of design use the `mastering' and `placing' of material at their outsets. But since, like we say, there's `no here in here' as far as the Internet goes, there's no place to conquer and no material to master. Instead there is attention to guide, speed to be controlled, to `arrive at' (there goes another old metaphor) some presence of information, and focus.

Meta-information makes information present, but most of it is invisible for humans. It is there to be seen by search engines and knowbots that cruise the net to find out about content. Meta-information of this kind is hidden in code: in tags that reveal keywords, description, source and status of the information attached. When you open the source of an HTML document you can read the meta-information. It is in natural language with some strange abbreviations and punctuation around it. It reads like theory or poetry, it is information by itself, information on information, a guide to content.

Visible, or visual, meta-information would be the ideal counterpart to the invisible kind. Before I decide to pay attention to any piece of information that is presented (but not yet present) to me, I will hope for the meta-information to (instantly) inform me on whether or not this content deserves my attention. Being sophisticated users as we all are (or soon will have to be), we want to be undivided in our attention, connected and productive in any exchange. Not so because we are in any kind of a hurry, but because we want to learn, improve our own and other's condition of life, stay up to date with society's progress, or decline, and generally be prepared for life in the information age. We want to develop what I call an `information habit' that is just as natural and culturally fit as any other instinct.

To myself, like to others in the arts and design community, design already serves as meta-information, as a selection tool. Simply put: `bad' design puts you off, as an almost physical hindrance in the communication of information. When good information suffers bad design it really suffers. Bad design-as-meta-information is a warning sign: this information is apparently sloppy, its source did not bother to dress it decently, in order to improve its presence. Why bother to look into it? This happens too often in any medium and the WWW is no exception to the rule. Bad design has nothing to do with authenticity of the content it conveys, as is sometimes suggested. No design is, in some cases, a forgivable sign of no priority. No design is meta-information that my selective apparatus interprets as signalling presence to be looked into. No design however is rare. It is restricted to important instants of communication that are either un-designable (like immediate face-to-face contact, when the meta-information that is design prone is in the sources' apparel, or other attributes), or when design is plain absent (as in some personal notes on bulletinboards in supermarkets, shopping lists, street lamp posters informing you about lost pets, and the like). But also `no design' does not guarantee any importance of the content advertized and is no sign of authenticity per se.

The lessons learned from all examples of good, bad or no design are that, with increasing traffic speed, the more information from myriad sources is communicated, the more information design—as intermediation, as meta-information, as a guiding, selecting tool—is called for. In communication media like the web private and public information are informing each other (like in the example of the patients' association), to present itself as vital content. The feed-back loop of information in dynamic media, when every consumer is a producer indeed, defines the contours of content and interest. In this process information design awaits a huge challenge to perform and deliver. The need for information design to adapt its strategies and revise its role, from mastering to guiding, is accomplished in its definition as meta-information: `Information design is visual meta-information. In dynamic communication media that are defined by special interest, it is a graphic tool for content selection and management and informs any communication connection and any information exchange.'

Compatible to this definition, design does equal information, as its crucial counterpart: performing as information-on-information, design should not aim to solidify any message, but to do just the opposite: to keep it flexible, adaptable, customizable, to all of its users, without forfeiting any content of the prime information conveyed.

Last we should speculate as to what the `look and feel' of design as meta-information would be like. First of all we should acknowledge that it calls forth as much an editorial as a design process. Before anything we rewrite the design brief. Editorial changes could well mean sending back to the writer all of the text submitted, or hire a new person on the job. Web writing is still in its infancy. Jakob Nielsen did a lot of usability testing on web directed text and came to remarkable conclusions, which are obligatory reading for any information designer. Then design as meta-information should reflect the status of the document, its possible expiration, or its update frequency, its liability to annotation by users. In some occasions the design would incorporate different generations of the same document, to make visible its growth or decline over time. It should articulate web based and off-web contexts. Customization of content could be part of the design: especially content that should be accessible to users with different levels of `literacy' would benefit from different design solutions presented, which should include the selection mechanism for users to make a choice upon. Design sophistication is yet another mechanism like the previous one: why not present the same document in different design styles, to meet with different user preferences and even taste. Same goes by the way for the different languages in which a document should be presented. A global audience is a multi-lingual audience and a global market adapts accordingly. Also it is a market of cultural diversity. Design, shape, color, interaction all read differently in different cultural niches. Web based information reaches corners that other media are unaware of. Web based information may profit from feedback and feedback is the next design tool. To have users inform you, as much as you want to inform them, is a golden rule. This is the only way to track diversity in order to apply its effects to your design.

The above is only the very beginning of a set of new design criteria that will define design as meta-information for dynamic media. True to the medium and true to its indefinite change a list will never stabilize. The information designer knows that he or she has to inspect his or her tools and at every single occasion update the vocabulary. Paying attention and tribute to change is the only way to succeed in dynamic publishing.

paying attention, earning attention and... oh yeah, speed control 49 words
All the best information is shared information. It comes to you addressed personally and immediately catches your attention. It reads `Dear Jouke', instead of `Hello Jouke Kleerebezem, get recommendations just for you! (If you're not Jouke Kleerebezem, click here)... as with Amazon.com. But Amazon.com will learn from the Bibliophilia Sufferers' Association. It will learn from those who address me as `Dear Jouke'. Because they are the ones that I am truly dependent of to share vital information with, and we will tell each other what to read. Most of the information we share is meta-information: personal preferences, annotations to existing content that we debate, pointers to interesting sites and projects, hypotheses on the flow of things. This `what do you think' and `what do you make of it' kind of information deserves all my attention. Because those two open questions are precisely the ones that can not be asked enough to someone. These are after all the questions that, with `how are you', the patients' associations hum with.

Information design is certainly taken by surprise by the unruly emergence of information technology's latest and hottest tools and connections and markets. Information design is tossed up in the whirl of the Internet and World Wide Web push and pull, or as it is only half-jokingly called: the media's `hunt for eyeballs'. The information age's only scarcity will be people's attention. To learn about the economy of attention and the net, we have to turn to Michael Goldhaber: `The real promise of the Web and the net and the like, though also a promise it can never completely fulfil, is to help satisfy the ever more pressing desire attention. To get attention you must emit what is technically identifiable as information; likewise for information to be of any value, it must receive attention. Therefore an information technology is also an attention technology, or in other words, a transfer of information is only completed when there is also a transfer of attention proceeding in the opposite direction.' For information design's sake we rather re-label the `Republic of Information' the `Republic of Attention', which introduces the last points I want to make.

Information changes to stay alive: it's trickster wizardry, disguises a lot and mediates between different worlds of interest, never to settle. In dynamic media, information drifts like snow. Eskimo languages are said to contain quite a lot of words for snow. Counts differ. Interpretations differ. A 20 second webwide search with AltaVista on `eskimo AND snow' returns 162,703 documents that `match your query', of which a quick scan proves that a majority indeed refers in one way or another to linguistic richness, and seriously debates it in different contexts. I try another search, with `Northern Light', as seems appropriate for this specific search: 4,320 items are returned, that `best match your search'.

The Eskimo's attention for snow is hard to beat, and could serve as an example to our attention for `information'. Now for the first time placed between quotation marks, for relativity, since this word appears 153 times in the above text (which makes up almost 3% of it—how is that for meta-information?) and is otherwise used by all of us so light-heartedly.

No two snowflakes are quite alike, but to our luck they don't come down heavy with meta-tags... Yet snow's unpredictable behaviour, its different speeds, its whirl and float, its temporariness, its habit to turn into water, or ice, informs our senses, only to promote diversity and attention.

---

some recommended reading 50 words
David Gelernter
Mirror Worlds; or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...; How It Will
Happen and What It Will Mean
Oxford University Press 1992
ISBN 0-19-507906-X

Vilém Flusser
Vom Subjekt zum Projekt; Menschwerdung
Bollmann Verlag 1994
ISBN 3-927-901-350

Mark Poster
The Mode of Information; Poststructuralism and Social Context
Polity Press 1990
ISBN 0-7456-0327-0

Lewis Hyde
Trickster Makes This World; Mischief, Myth, and Art
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1998
ISBN 0-374-27928-4


feedback up